Dell Inspiron 15R 5537 GPU problems?

I'm on the market for a new laptop, my old one is getting a bit tired.
The Dell Inspiron 15R 5537 caught my eye as a good new laptop even though it "only" has a dual core cpu. It is really the dedicated GPU that and the HD display that makes it interesting. However after Googling a bit I can see that there are few people having a problem with this laptop and the graphics card. Seems like only the Intel graphics are running and making games really laggy. I'm not a big gamer but still, if I'm buying a computer with a dedicated GPU then I want that to be running not the integrated chip.
Anyone familiar with this? Is it possible to change the GPU in BIOS on this particular model?

 

Anyone?

Is this a hybrid system? What I mean is does the AMD graphic card take over the Intel when I start a game....something like that

 

Is this the model with i7-4500U and Radeon HD 8850M? I had the "pleasure" of having this laptop for a weekend. The switchable graphics indeed don't work as intended. I downloaded the official drivers from Dell's website(was using Windows 8) and everything, but no matter what I did, it stayed on the integrated Intel video adapter.

I returned it because of this and other reasons: optical drive does an annoying "check for disk" sound at every wake from hibernation or restart, also does this electrical crackling sound when plugged in. Granted, the latter two "defects" could have been on that machine only, but the switchable graphics thing sounds like a driver issue. I posted in Dell's official forums asking for help and got no reply in over two weeks, and other threads with similar problems had no working solution either. So that slightly put me off Dell laptops for now.

Also, I forgot to answer your original question. It's not a hybrid system. I'm not an expert in this, but the way I understand, the Intel GPU is always on and the Radeon is only supposed to kick in when more power is needed. And it's not possible to use only the dedicated GPU.

 

That's the one! And that sucks

 

Replying to a bit of an old thread but I think its relevant.

I have this laptop with the 4500U CPU and 8850 dedicated card. I have indeed have had several problems with this machine but I have essentially "fixed" them all.

With regards to the switchable graphics issue - it is indeed a driver problem and it took quite a while to sort out but here's my experience if its any use (I am running Windows 8.1 Update 1 on a Samsung 830 256GB SSD - and it flies).

The first indication if an issue was when I tried to make the laptop sleep after upgrading to Windows 8.1. It would go to sleep no problems but the problem came when I tried to wake it up - it just restarted. Every time. That was a pain. Anyway uninstalled catalyst (including the drivers) and the sleep function worked perfectly.
I tried the original drivers from Dell - no good, sleep issue
I tried the latest driver from the manufacturers website - no good, still had the sleep issue
I tried the latest driver from Microsoft by uninstalling all drivers and right-clicking on the card in device manager and get latest driver - no good, sleep issue.
However.... as a last ditch attempt I uninstalled all drivers for the card and let Windows Update find the driver - bingo! It worked. It found a Radeon driver in the Windows Update list and I clicked on it. This must be a different driver to the one found by going through the device manager. Anyway Radeon card installed and no sleep issue.

The next problem is that I have no way to actually configure the switchable graphics becuase Catalyst appears to be the only way to do that. So I fired up the Catalyst driver from Dell but in the setup I told it to NOT install the display driver, just the catalyst software. I can happily report that everything now works perfectly with regards to the graphics cards.
SO to recap, I'm using the Dell Intel graphics driver, the Windows Update Radeon Driver and the Dell Catalyst software (without driver)

Also its worth noting that the Radeon card will not be used if the laptop is not plugged into AC power. I believe this can be rectified by changing some of the advanced power options within Windows but to be honest I dont mind this as it ensures I use AC power during gaming. I will change the power settings if this ever becomes a problem.

As for the ODD making a noise occasionally, I am intending to replace the optical drive with the original 1TB drive that came with the machine and a caddy.

All in all after a weeks worth of tinkering I am really liking this laptop, its the perfect size, has a fairly good screen (I do a lot of photo work and it calibrates OK) and good viewing angles. Speed of processing has never been an issue and it flies though anything I throw at it. The only real downside I can say about it is that it only has a 10/100 ethernet card and I am used to gigabit ethernet at home so transferring my files back and forth becomes a bit of a chore. However this can be fixed with a USB 3 to gigabit ethernet adapter if it really annoys me.

Cheers.

PS having sata III 6 gbps on my hard drive is nice ;-) !